The man who brought the Ebola virus to Nigeria probably knew he was infected. Surveillance video of Patrick Sawyer before boarding his flight at Liberia’s James Sprigg Payne’s Airport showed “Mr. Sawyer lying flat on his stomach on the floor in the corridor of the airport and seemed to be in ‘excruciating pain.’ The footage showed Mr. Sawyer preventing people from touching him.”

He collapsed upon arrival in Nigeria, after a layover in Togo and was rushed to a Nigerian hospital. Upon being told he had Ebola, he acted with what the Nigerians called “indiscipline”; a burst of rage and despair against the world and everyone in it.

Upon being told he had Ebola, Mr. Sawyer went into a rage, denying and objecting to the opinion of the medical experts. “He was so adamant and difficult that he took the tubes from his body and took off his pants and urinated on the health workers, forcing them to flee.

Amazingly, he was even then in the process of being sprung by his political connections before death intervened. Had he lived Sawyer might have gotten out and protected by the juju of expensive watches and status symbols, mingled among the muckety-mucks of ECOWAS.

“The hospital would later report that it resisted immense pressure to let out Sawyer from its hospital against the insistence from some higher-ups and conference organizers that he had a key role to play at the ECOWAS convention in Calabar, the Cross River State capital.

In fact, FrontPageAfrica has been informed that officials in Monrovia were in negotiations with ECOWAS to have Sawyer flown back to Liberia.

Eight of the Nigerian hospital workers are now infected with Ebola, including the doctor who attended Sawyer. One, a nurse, has already died. The Liberian president, Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson, apologized to Nigeria for the incident. She said “Patrick Sawyer was on surveillance, but he sneaked out of Liberia”. Sneaked out, presumably, to hobnob with the big shots of the region.

Ken Isaacs of Samaritan’s Purse told a Congressional Hearing that the WHO is underreporting the Ebola epidemic. “Ken Isaacs, a vice president with Samaritan’s Purse, a North Carolina-based Christian humanitarian organization, also said the number of Ebola cases and deaths reported by the World Health Organization are probably 25 percent to 50 percent below actual levels.”

Isaacs told of a prominent Liberian doctor who “openly mocked the existence of Ebola” by trying to enter a hospital isolation ward with no gloves or protective clothing. He and another man who accompanied him to the hospital both died within five days, Isaacs said.

At one point, Isaacs even disputed the earlier testimony of a physician from the U.S. Agency for International Development, who said his agency had provided 35,000 protective suits for health care workers in West Africa.

Isaacs told lawmakers he had received an email in the last 90 minutes from a hospital in Liberia “asking us for more personal protection gear. This a problem everywhere,” he said.

Equipment might not be a problem for much longer. Finding people to wear them will. Ebola is rapidly killing off the medical personnel and shutting down the hospitals. The dead are being left to die in the street, where with a last effort, some of them crawl out to expire.

The Telegraph says authorities have warned people against bring the sick to churches. “According to Dr Bernice Dahn, Liberia’s chief medical officer, three of the victims passed away while they were being sheltered in a local church – a sign of how many some people believe the disease is a curse that can be cured by prayer or witchcraft.” But in a situation where medical science is equally helpless, many people, as the Daily Telegraph notes, have simply fled to the bars and honky-tonks.

People don’t die here now,” said the deputy chief of the hospital’s burying team, Albert J. Mattia, exasperated after a long day of Ebola burials. “They are dying in the community, five, six a day.” Mr. Mattia was particularly disturbed that many of the bodies his team were putting in the ground had come from outside the hospital, thwarting attempts to isolate patients and prevent them from passing the disease to others.

“It’s very, very dangerous, very hazardous; it is contributing to the Ebola dead,” he said as his two deputies nodded glumly in agreement. “You go to the wards, there are no patients.”

When they’re not in denial, they’re angry. A crowd approached the journalist’s group threateningly.

“A crowd gathered, and some accused us health workers of spreading the disease ourselves. They even began touching a local journalist we had brought with us, saying: ‘if you think it is us spreading it, then here you are, we will infect you’.”

In places where villagers see a doctor, they flee into the bush, shouting “Ebola! Ebola!” You can see why Sawyer freaked out like he did. He was in the grip of some nameless devil and lashed out at anything and everything.

The received Western wisdom is that an Ebola epidemic is best controlled by quarantine and contact monitoring. You know, with isolation wards and databases and non-available disposable protective clothing in 110 degree heat. In a word, through a program of action which Africa is singularly unable to carry out. African officialdom lives by lies, faking documents and jumping the queue. Like some American political parties, that is how they handle crisis. That’s how they’ll handle this one.

With the hospitals gone, they are now “sending troops” to isolate the disease. More likely than not the troops will themselves carry the virus and since no one can stop armed men, they will go where they like.

That’s right, cordon it off

Much of the coverage has centered on the epidemic in Liberia and Nigeria, because these countries are relatively accessible to English speaking journalists. But we have no idea what is happening in Sierra Leone or Guinea, which is one of the most corrupt countries on earth. Officials claim only about 1,000 people have died from Ebola in West Africa so far, ‘not many’ in such a vast region. But this completely underrates the real danger. The relevant population against which such casualties must be measured are the medical personnel. They are being wiped out. Africa has a very limited store of scientific, medical and technical human capital and once these irreplaceables are killed or intimidated then the man issuing the medical exit visas will be an illiterate with a rubber stamp.

And then anyone can get on a plane. Maybe anyone already can — providing he’s official.

Culture is the key to survival, not just in Africa but also in the West. The prosperity of the last 70 years has made us forget that exact knowledge matters, not for any reasons of social status, but for survival. Nature doesn’t care what you think. It doesn’t care about spin doctors say or what someone said in a speech. The virus is a physical information object, which given input, produces output. “Don’t touch the walls!” applies as much to presidents as to villagers.

Perhaps Ebola will stay in Africa. But one shouldn’t count on it. Readers will recall reports Libyan hospital systems are collapsing as expatriate health workers, who make up 80% of medical personnel, evacuate. The hospital systems in Syria and Iraq are probably highly degraded by now. Two days ago, a Saudi businessman died after returning from West Africa, after exhibiting Ebola-like symptoms, but the diagnosis has not been confirmed. The wars of the region have created an extraordinary fertile ground for epidemic. If Ebola should get to Mecca then we will rediscover the truism that no man is an island, especially not in our globalized world.

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Short term politics and jockeying for advantage is what will kill us all. Note that from what we can tell, in all the West African countries the first response to Ebola was the very human one of denial. If they have Ebola, it means that there is a real problem that cannot be denied. And their world is now irrevocably turned upside down.

It is here. The government wants to leave the southern border wide open purely for political advantage [extra-constitutional advantage, but that is another post. Think 10-289.]. Therefore, that outweighs the deliberate importation of pandemic diseases. In fact the importation is a feature and not a bug. We have suspicious cases that may well be Ebola here, and the government's primary concern seems to be messaging and information control.

I have only done a cursory check, but I am highly suspicious of the patient at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan. An American, he had returned from West Africa Sunday, and was admitted Sunday night at Mount Sinai Hospital through the ER where he had presented with symptoms that could be Ebola. Tests take 3 days. That was up Wednesday.

There has been no news. Online, the last I can find [quick search] is from a couple of days ago when they were awaiting test results.

While it is not probative, it is highly indicative that there have been no news releases. If it was NOT Ebola, one would expect the government through the CDC and the media to be trumpeting the fact [and bashing all of us Neanderthals who are 'h8ters' who fear imported diseases.]. The odds are, that if he has Ebola, they would be concealing it.

But even if he does not [and I really hope that he does not]; keep in mind that the US government has refused to restrict travel to the infected areas, AND that we have caught 71 illegals from the infected countries so far this year ON OUR DELIBERATELY OPEN SOUTHERN BORDER. We only catch a couple percent of those trying to sneak in.

It is coming, and we are repeating the mistakes of West Africa; deliberately or otherwise.

I just saw the word "viral" on a link from Drudge. It was about Kate Upton, famous for a video of her doing the "cat daddy dance" being interrupted on her morning talk show gig by a news flash of America bombing ISIS. Priorities.

What is the Obama program? Open Borders, Disarmament, and Deindustrialization, with jobs for the SEIU crew fantasy economics masquerading as Health Care. What is reality choosing at this most apt of moments to demonstrate? The crucial importance of law and order and well regulated borders. The importance of maintaining robust military forces to combat genuine barbarian monsters. The need for secure energy supplies and a sound economy generating wealth that can build the tools needed to combat threats. The need for medical science based on meritocracy and research and the free flow of information and the ability to respond quickly to needs while taking the risks that only Capitalism permits.

If God is not speaking then Nature is doing a good job of playing his ventriloquist.

"The man who brought the Ebola virus to Nigeria probably knew he was infected... 'He collapsed upon arrival in Nigeria, after a layover in Togo and was rushed to a Nigerian hospital… Upon being told he had Ebola, Mr. Sawyer went into a rage, denying and objecting to the opinion of the medical experts. 'He was so adamant and difficult that he took the tubes from his body and took off his pants and urinated on the health workers, forcing them to flee.'"

Call me paranoid, but has the thought occurred to anyone else that what we are witnessing is an act of biological warfare? According to CDC director Thomas Frieden the spread of this particular strain of (bio-engineered?) Ebola to the United States (and presumably everywhere else) is inevitable. Maybe that's the game plan, just as long as the biggest of the big shots have already been vaccinated. I've heard it said before that "population reduction" is a goal of leftist intellectuals and political leaders. Maybe Mr. Sawyer was a pawn in such an evil scheme, because, as we now know, leftists have to crack a few million (or billion) eggs to make an omelet.

OBAMA: BAD INTELLIGENCE BEHIND ISIS UNDERESTIMATIONSaturday from the White House South Lawn, President Barack Obama blamed "intelligence estimates" for not anticipating the speed in which ISIS would capture large sections of Iraq.

The president,who has been under harsh media criticism for likening ISIS to an Al-Qaeda JV basketball team in January said, "There is no doubt that their advance their movement over the last several of months has been more rapid than the intelligence estimates and I think the the expectation of policy makers both in and outside of Iraq."

The president also made clear no troops would go into Iraq during this operation of humanitarian aid and military airstrikes on ISIS.---Bad Intel:Whitehouse was not provided any Newspapers, TV, or Internet access.

Generals failed to alert him that we have air assets capable of taking out columns of armed Toyotas on Iraq's highways.

FWIW at this late date in the thread? I've mentioned before that the Hajj is the greatest disease- spreading vector the world has ever known. Muslims will be disproportionately affected because of the relatively segregated modes of travel to and from Mecca.

Considering that we're now bombing Assad's enemies, we're back to executing Kremlin foreign policy, or IOW where we always are under Donkey tail, i'd like to echo the call (wazzit RWE?) for regime change, as the sole, only, lonely answer. But Putin needs to make the same sacrifice as Obama --they need to step down now, under the combined weight of global political failure having merged into a new Black Death already at the edges of the earth. They could still be the heroes they want to be, if they will step down in favor of just about anybody in the wings. They're too invested to respond to any further use they could possibly be. Russians and Americans cooperating could solve the incredible mess we Earthlings are in.

--hearing the Guns of August again, are we? The ISIS attack on Christians and Kurds is unfolding so much like, and so nearby, the so-called "Armenian Genocide" that it's almost unbelievable.

The term itself is a hideous sin. Overblown rhetoric? I dunno --considering that it was actually a jihad operation against Christians, one marvels at the perfect persistance of the disinformation in the name "Armenian Genocide".

One hundred years ago, give or take a few, these Christian girls were crucified by jihadis along the road to Aleppo --from whence the present ISIS sprung forth.

“Repeated sacrifices over hundreds of years defending this great nation, undone is less than 3 decades starting with folks who went along with monsters such as Teddy Kennedy, and ending with this America hating atrocity in the Whitehouse.”

To some extent it started with Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. It kept going with FDR, and then the ball really got rolling with Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. It's the Plutocratic Left – people who think that because they have a boarding school education or an Ivy degree, they have a divine right to control other peoples' lives. When, in reality, they live in a bubble. When their understanding of reality is based upon reading Cliff's Notes.

At least since JFK, the United States has been governed by a class of rich cheaters, people who espouse ridiculously shallow idealism in public yet practice callous treachery in secret. Shallow people who use the language of deep thinking to make themselves sound intelligent. People who take short cuts to power. People who blithely talk of managing the world, as if the world were theirs to manage. Obama is a culmination of long standing trends in this direction.